Sep. 18, 2013

School on Wheels volunteer Betty Edmonds hugs Jesse Hatcher while working on school work at the Dayspring Center in this 2011 photo. Agenices such as DaySpring say they've seen increased demand for services as the poverty rate rises in Indiana. / The Star 2011 file photo

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Every month, the calls flood into Dayspring Center. Hundreds of them. Families, all of them poor and most them already homeless for months, are desperate for a place to stay.

Yet Lori Casson, executive director of the shelter, often has to turn them away.

“The issue is capacity for my agency,” she said. “I can only serve 14 families at a time. We’re always 99.9 percent full. It takes less than four hours for a room to turn over.”

This is the kind of desperation that’s happening under the radar in Indianapolis, the rest of Indiana and across the country.

The Census Bureau this week reported that more than 1 in 7 Americans — that’s 46.5 million people — were living in poverty last year. That’s about the same as in 2011, and it’s the sixth straight year that the numbers haven’t improved.

Yet for some reason, reports such as these often come and go with little notice or end up the target of derision from the gainfully employed people who think that being poor, or homeless, could never happen to them.

Here’s the truth: Many of the people who are poor, homeless or at risk of homelessness are families with children. Often, they are classified as the “working poor.”

They’re not just the middle-aged men you see hanging out Downtown, hassling you for money. Or the people who Indianapolis police removed from a camp under the Davidson Street railroad bridge last month.

“Families tend not to be standing on the corner,” Casson says, “and they don’t want to be seen.”

Point is, being poor — and even being homeless — isn’t something that happens to other people who don’t look like you and could never be you. It’s something that happens to us. Or, more to the point, it could happen to any one of us.

That is especially the case in Indiana.

Here, the median household income was $46,707 last year, well below the national average of $51,017. And the decline in Indiana from 2000 to 2012 was the fourth largest in the country. Meanwhile, we have tens of thousands of people without health insurance, and that will remain the case for some time now.

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The agencies that serve as social safety nets know this all too well.

They say they are serving more people, not fewer. Neighborhoods in Indianapolis that have been the domain of people who have been poor for generations are seeing an increase in people from the suburbs who have lost their jobs and homes. They’re moving not because they want to live in these urban core neighborhoods but because they have no choice.

Part of the problem is education. As states go, Indiana ranks low in postsecondary educational attainment (42nd in the nation).

Part of the problem is jobs, too. We don’t have enough jobs in the state that pay people a living wage. Many of the good jobs we do have are in danger of being eliminated. One has to look no further than Beech Grove and the 550 jobs that could be lost if funding isn’t found to keep daily Amtrak service from Indianapolis to Chicago.

These are huge, macro-level problems that few people reading this column have the power to fix.

But then there’s the micro-level. Here, everyone can have an impact.

It could come in the form of writing a check. It also could come in the form of volunteering, and not just for the big-name nonprofits in town. Gleaners, for example, does great work, but it has no shortage of volunteers. The same can’t be said for other, smaller organizations such as Dayspring.

Perhaps the most important thing that we can do is simply change our attitudes. We need to stop vilifying the poor for being poor.

Indiana is a state that values hard work, as it should. But with numbers like those the Census Bureau released Tuesday — numbers that are holding steady in this still so-so economy — it’s clear that hard work alone won’t pull people out of poverty. So we need to stop acting like it will.

“People make bad choices. People make good choices,” Shepard said. “How long do they have to suffer the consequences of those decisions? And at what point do we help people overcome that?”